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Margarita's Soul: The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty, a novel by Josephine Daskam Bacon |
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Part One. In Which You See A Secret Spring - Chapter 3. As The Twigs Were Bent |
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_ PART ONE. IN WHICH YOU SEE A SECRET SPRING CHAPTER III. AS THE TWIGS WERE BENT The day that Roger and I first met is as clear in my mind as if, in the current phrase, it were but yesterday. I was a slender little lad of ten and he a great, strapping fifteen-year-old. I was trundling my hoop about the part of the schoolyard usually given over to the little fellows, as blue as indigo, homesick for my mammy-O, and secretly ashamed of the French school-boy cape I had worn at Vevay, which all my mates derided, but she in her woman's thrift had thought too good to throw aside. No doubt she was right, but oh, what you make us suffer, you gentle widow mothers! You would give us the hearts out of your fervent bodies for footballs, you will nurse at our sick beds without rest and deny yourself the comforts of existence, if need be, to start us fairly in the world with a gentle training and schools of the best, but you cannot comprehend that we would far rather go without a meal in private than be the mock of our schoolmates in public. I would have lived on bread and water for a week could I have buried that French cloak at the end of it. The very sport in which I was engaged was not in use among the other boys of my age, but inconsistently enough, though I was eager to conform as far as the cloak was concerned, wild horses could not have dragged me from my wooden hoop, and I trundled it sulkily up and down the flagged paths. To me, an odd figure enough to young American eyes, advanced and spoke Monsieur Duval, in whose regard I was the most homelike and natural figure in the landscape, I have no doubt. It was with a real kindness that he called out some cheery nothing, some "Ah! Ah! ca va bien--vous vous amusez, n'est-ce pas? " or such like, and with an equal and unconscious amiability that I replied in like manner. The language was perfectly familiar to me, especially in its present routine connection, and I took off my cap instinctively, as I should have done at Vevay, and probably said something about my being joliment bien amuse, which was purely perfunctory of course, because I wasn't. He passed by and I trundled my hoop along, but only during the space of time required for his complete exit from the scene, for at the precise ending of that time I was violently set upon by three or four boys, dragged, protesting and frightened, to a private retreat, and there informed that my nauseating familiarity with the French language and consequent "showing off" therein must cease incontinently, and that the event of my refusing this ultimatum would be a perilous and not easily forgotten one for a little sneak like me. Now our school at Vevay had been entirely under the influence, in its secret and really important life, of a circle of English boys, cruelly banished from their natural educational facilities, who made up for this banishment by a careful and systematic insistence on as much as possible of their native school atmosphere, and we little ones were bred up in this very strictly. The word "sneak" was too much for me, and I flew at the offender, which was, I suppose, what he wanted. It would have gone hard indeed with me had not a tall, broad-shouldered boy, glorious in a jersey enriched with the initials of the school, swung suddenly upon us and twitched me out of the bandit crew by my coat collar. "What's all this? What are you up to?" he asked briskly. He had a baseball bat with him--I regarded baseball at that time as a sort of cricket gone mad--and a round visored cap on his thick fair hair. His chin was deeply cleft, his eyes grey-blue, his skin very fair. To me he was an upper-form demi-god and I, seeing nothing odd in his actions, for he was what I called the cock of the school, voiced my trembling plea. "If you please, sir," I began, whereat he blushed and my captors burst into derisive shouts and capered around us, and thoroughly embarrassed and frightened, I began to snivel into my elbow. "We don't talk that way over here," he admonished me shortly, "go ahead without any sirs, can't you?" Well, it all came out finally and he settled it very easily, though not, I am sure, in the way he had at first intended to. I saw his fingers tighten around the bat, I saw him warily measuring his chances against four twelve-year-olds, and realised suddenly that this was not Albion the long desired of some of us at Vevay, but free America, and that this was not really the head boy nor had he any rights in particular beyond any knight's who chooses to ride a-rescuing. Nevertheless I was and am sure he could have punished them all and that without the bat. Suddenly, however, a reflective look came across his face, he stroked the cleft in his chin thoughtfully--a trick he never lost--and said in a quiet, convincing tone: "You always were an awful fool, Judson," this to the bully. "If you had the sense of a cat you wouldn't haze this little fellow for what he can't help, but instead you'd use him. Why, if I had him in my French class, I'd make him do most of the reciting and keep old Duval busy--he'd never see through it. Think it over. Come on, shaver!" This he said to me and I trotted off his slave--his fag, I hoped, but vainly, as it proved. I tell this at length because it illustrates Roger's character so perfectly. Not that he couldn't fight, but he preferred not if a little practical arbitration could be made to do the work of battle. And yet he was rather tactless in a social sense: this was his professional attitude, you understand. "You're the little French boy," he said, as I followed him. "What's your name, anyhow? I'm Roger Bradley." As if I didn't know! "If you pl--I mean, mine is Winfred Jerrolds," I said shyly. "You're not really French, are you?" It was the first time I had ever been proud of my American blood. I told him about my American mother and my English father, his tragic death and her return to her own country after twelve years of absence; of the acquisition of my wonderful French, which was only the work of two years, of my violin lessons, strictly concealed from the other boys, of my old Swiss nurse, now our cook, of my French poodle, and a score of other secrets never breathed before. He was deeply interested, inquired the brave details of my father's death, shook hands heartily, and expressed his intention of inviting me to his home some time during the vacation. We parted the best of friends and shall be, I trust, till we part for good and all. I did not visit him, however, that vacation. Some slight injury, received during a game of his favourite baseball, affected his eyes, and for six months he could not use them at all, so he did not return to school until the next autumn. When we met again it was on a different basis, for I had made good use of my time and had mounted rapidly in my classes. Whether it was because I kept the habit of vacation study (the entire lazy freedom of American school children during the long vacation was very shocking to my mother) or whether my habit of application and concentration, the fact that I had really been taught to study, not merely turned loose with a book in my hands, gave me an advantage over my mates, I do not know, but when Roger came back he found me only three classes below him and graduated from the little boys' playground forever. That summer he took me home with him and I gazed with deep respect upon the portraits of his ancestors, fading against the dark wainscots of the respectable Boston mansion; played my violin obediently for his mother, who presented me with a volume of Emerson's essays; hung upon the lips of his soldier-uncle, one-armed since Gettysburg, who in his turn listened gravely to my tales of my father; and sedulously avoided his cousin Sarah, who, even then, a fresh-faced girl of eighteen, had begun to feel those responsibilities toward the human race which have since so consistently distinguished her, and pursued me with hideous bits of paper bearing a mocking resemblance to blank cheques, which she called "pledges," by means of which she urged me to begin in the days of my youth the practice of total abstinence, with the result that she has become hopelessly involved in my mind with that revolting practice. They were Unitarians, a doctrine then fashionable in those regions, oddly enough, and greatly to the puzzlement of my dear mother, who could not understand how dissent could ever be so, and who was firmly convinced that "your Bradleys" as she called them, were addicted to ranting prayers on all occasions. In vain I described to her old Madam Bradley with a scrap of frosty lace on her white hair, a terrifying ear trumpet and the manners of a countess; in vain I assured her that Uncle Winthrop would no more be guilty of a ranting prayer than my father would have been: she shook her head gently and urged me to recall my confirmation vows! My dear mother! To write of her even so slightly is to see her in her neat black dress with its web-like bands of lawn at neck and wrists, directing old Jeanne, bonne-a-tout-faire now in our small establishment, watering our window geraniums from a quaint, long-nosed copper pot, drilling Mr. Boffin, the poodle, in his manners, and, when the early dinner was out of the way, sitting in all simplicity with Jeanne at work upon my shirts--the only example of really democratic institutions that I ever saw in this irascible democracy. I should like to have seen Madam Bradley sewing with the cook and innocently gossiping over the old days! Well, well, even to have invented so inhumanly possible an ideal as democracy is a great feat and a wonderful exhibition of the powers of our minds on this planet, I suppose. And I am not sure that it is a greater proof of sincerity to practice it while denying it in theory, as they do in the old countries, than to reverse the process in the new ones. Americans are such incurable idealists! And if Plato is right and the idea is the really important part of the matter, then the idea of seventy--or is it eighty, now?--millions of equal lords of creation is really more to the point than the fact that they don't exist. But why, oh why, must equality produce such bad manners? They must have been very bad to make such an impression upon a little lad of ten. And who can explain its extraordinary effect upon the voice? Why does it kill all modulation, all tone-color, all delicate shades of thought and passion equally, and resolve that great gift, which I sometimes think the greatest difference between me and my dog, into a toneless, mumble-chopped grunting? That was the glory of Margarita's voice: if she but informed you that she would like more bread, your ear relished that series of unimportant syllables precisely as the tongue relishes a satisfying dish; with her, pleading, commanding, refusing, admiring, were four perfectly different tonal processes; a blind man, an Eskimo or a South Sea Islander would have understood that voice perfectly. And even now, merely a shadow of what it once was, it is a lesson to all about her. When Roger was seventeen and I but twelve he lost two years out of his school-life, and this brought us closer together ultimately, as will be seen. In some more than usually violent game of his favourite baseball at this time he managed to fall so heavily on his chest as slightly to bruise the lung, and a teasing cough that resulted from this terrified his mother, over whom, like so many of her pure-blooded countrywomen, the White Scourge hung threateningly, never very far away. Good luck sent them just then an invitation from a distant cousin, skipper of a large schooner that plied in Southern waters, and she thankfully sent Roger off for a long cruise with him. It was a fine experience, and oh, how bitterly I longed to share it, as the skipper cousin urged me to do! But I was the only son of my mother and she a widow, and so I swallowed my grief and contented myself with writing. It had long been a great grief to me that I must follow him so far behind at college--he had of course decided me on his own university--and one of my contentments at this period was the hope of winning ahead a year and leaving only two between us. This would enable me to enter Yale when he was but half way in his course, which as a matter of fact, I accomplished, to my mother's great pride. She liked Roger, but always found him a little heavy and slow, and secretly cherished my greater facility and more rapid mental development with a fond and wholly female short-sightedness. Our correspondence was very characteristic at this time: I have specimens of both sides of it. My letters are long and detailed, almost school-diaries. Roger's are few, short and immensely impressive. He had a straightforward, utterly unimaginative style that strikes the heart like Defoe's. He gave the strongest sense of great events always happening, of high seas, bright, strange coasts, racy, vital talk--and all in few, short words. "We have been rolling hard for three days now," he says in one letter, "and the ship's dog died of colic, which is about the worst sign there is, they say. It may be we shall be wrecked. I wish you were here, Jerry, you would enjoy it. They have stopped trying to coddle me now and I live rough, like the rest. The food is not so very good, but we all eat hard. I hardly ever cough at all now. The captain says I am as handy as the next man." The oldest of four, he had been looked up to and respected from the nursery. A powerful influence at school, a prince regent at home, wealthy in his own right, he stood in some danger of being spoiled, I suppose. But the bluff skipper cousin, representative of that strange New England Wanderlust, so little exploited in the anemic fiction that so ridiculously caricatures New England life, stamped Roger at this most impressionable age with the clean, downright simplicity, the manly humility so signally characteristic of men who must always be ready to perish in the elements; the ability to hold his tongue and wait. Few families really rooted in that Old England that made the New but can count in some generation their skipper cousin; in these the whitecaps, the tall masts, the spices and hot nights, the scarlet tropics and the dusky, startled natives tip with flame the quiet chronicles of the sisters left at home; and gorgeous peacock fans, rosy, enamelled shells, strings of sandalwood beads, riotous, bloomy embroideries and supple folds of exotic muslin weave their scents and suggestions through the sober-coloured stuff of everyday. Indeed, New England as I have known her, both as a child in her chief and representative city, and as a man in her farthest, least-spoiled hamlets has always seemed to me far more complicated and mysterious, far more vital and suggestive than her too-exclusively-spinsterly chroniclers can comprehend. I look to see the country turn back to New England, not only with historic pride, but with a rich appreciation of its artistic mother-land--not mistaking her for its bleak and apprehensive maiden aunt! I am far from her now, that old breeding ground of great, incisive sons, that nest of passions so strong that only a grip of granite--like her sea line--could master them (do you fancy, O languorous, faded South, do you bellow, O strident, bustling West, that because she neither sighed them nor trumpeted them, she had no passions? Allez, allez!) but I can close my eyes at any moment and smell the challenge of her Atlantic winds here on the Mediterranean or feel the heady languor of her miraculous "Indian Summer" there in a London drizzle. It is strange that I, who have said many unhandsome things of her country as a whole, should thus rush into apologia for my mother's birthplace. And yet to think of never having known Margarita! But of course I should have met her. She would have come to me walking lightly out of the dim Algerian evening or bumped into me some morning in Piccadilly or peered curiously through my leaded pane at Oxford, whither I should undoubtedly have returned, one day, to muse away my middle age. I idled for a happy year there, twenty-odd years ago, while Roger was grinding away at the fantastic matter he called the Law, and liked it well. But fate had not decreed me for a conventional Englishman, which I should doubtless have been, for as a boy I was malleable to a degree, but had reserved me instead for the ends of the earth--and Margarita. _ |
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